When you go to save a file on your Mac, you almost always have to click the dropdown arrow if you plan on saving that file anywhere different than where Apple wants you do. This gets annoying, but a Defaults-Write points to a Terminal command that changes this behavior.

As best as I can tell, the default behavior with this is to open up whatever save panel you used the last time you saved, but it’s not particularly consistent in my experience. If you want to just make sure you always get the expanded save panel, enter these two commands into Terminal:

That should set the expanded save panel as the default, though some third party apps don’t seem to honor this preference and just use whatever the last used view was. Still, this should solve the problem with most apps.